When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.